tumblr does not want you to see this flier from 1890:
Okay now that Tumblr finally let me post it, I found this amazing thing on Wikipedia. Some college kids in 1890 had to sit around a machine like this probably
and type TURDS in a bunch of different fonts. And it made Indiana University faculty so mad they literally hired the “Strike Worker Killing, Domestic Mercenary” Pinkerton Detective Agency to find who made it. At some point in 1890, Pinkertons were hunting down someone for typing “Here is a TURD! A sheeny TURD!” And this is a real part of American history.
That’s a hot metal typesetting machine, where like you type T-R-E-E-[ENTER] and it would physically pour molten lead into molds and dump you out a solid slug reading “ǝǝɹʇ” to run on your press
Those were cutting edge in the 1890s, big-city newspapers woulda had them but students for a joke would have set cold type by hand and printed it on a platen jobbing press
The standard critique of steampunk fashion is that it takes 19th century style and just slaps gratuitous gears on it.
But the interesting thing is that 19th century styles were spangled with gratuitous cutting-edge industrial products! European mechanization first took off with the (important!) textile industry, and fashion of the age took clothes and just slapped newly accessible lace, ribbons, and ruffles everywhere.
Ironically given all the shit they catch for pushing a purely bourgeois vision of the Industrial Age, the rivets-and-goggles set verge on Soviet in fetishizing industrialization in terms of “hard” heavy industry to the exclusion of “soft” consumer goods.
